Thursday, August 21, 2008

Nina Hartley Is A Bisexual Voyeur. But is she Honest?

Offsprung, a site I'd never heard of before now, has a fun interview with Nina Hartley here.

Nina Hartley, for those who don't know, is a porn star extraordinaire. She's been on the adult film scene for ages, and like many a female porn actress before her (Jill Kelly, Candida Royalle) she now makes her own movies.

This is all good, but Hartley kind of makes her sex life sound like Narnia, or Zion, or some other land we were promised but that hasn't quite yet materialized. She enthuses about the industry, but this is where the interviewer should have pushed a little harder.

If this interview is genuine (and it is!) then so is Bella Donna's tearful interview about how much she wanted to get out.

All sources filter themselves, particularly ones who (like Hartley) have made a killing doing something the rest of the world looks down on. I have nothing against porn, and nothing against Hartley, but the glowing review of all things adult film, as well as her tendency to gloss over things that are a real problem in the industry kinda suggest she's looking at her world through rose-colored glasses.

A similar tendency comes up again in this bally-hooed piece in Radar magazine, about a 23-year-old writer who starts a story about prostitution only to find herself - surprise, surprise! - smack in the middle of it. Am I the only one who thinks it disingenious of the writer to say "I couldn't say no" when a madam first asks her to take off her clothes for an appraisal?

Of course this journalist could have said no. We're talking about getting naked, after all. People say no to that all the time. She didn't say no because she was curious - personally, professionally - whatever! It's hard to hear, as a young magazine writer making maybe $15/hr, that some girls get 100 times that and a Tiffany bonus at the end of the year. I'd like to meet one woman who hasn't been curious about sex work at some point.

The curiosity is no problem. The problem is that Pilot edits it out of her story, conveniently making the madam into a force of nature and herself into a leaf caught up in the gale.

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About Me

Journalism exists because we need a mechanism through which we can keep our government honest and accountable. I'm a working journalist, but these days, reading "mega-papers" like the New York Times and the Washington Post frustrates me. Too often, reporters for these outlets are unprepared to report from "international" environments where they know neither the history nor the culture. Today, more than ever, we face a growing need for more "honest" reporting. Reporting grounded in facts, rather than government statistics. Reporting grounded in local perspective, rather than international generalizations. Here, I cite the best and the worst of these international news stories, and provide perspective from local blogs and news outlets to help keep the newsmen honest.